Great British Bake Off Week Five

Bake Off week five and we’re half way through the series. This time it was into unchartered territory with a theme of 1920’s baking. When they do this sort of thing I’m never quite sure if they come up with the theme first and then try matching recipes to it or if it’s the other way around. I have visions of people sat with cookbooks and post it notes desperately trying to link things together.

The challenges set for the bakers were custard tarts as the signature, Beignets Soufflé as the technical and a cocktail cake for the show stopper. I’m not sure if custard tarts were really a twenties food favourite or if they were picked because they were flung about in so many slapstick comedies from that era. The Beignets were a new bake to me, they are small fried balls of choux pastry with a little bit of jam in them, in this case they were served with a sabayon sauce that was flavoured with Marsala wine. The cocktail cakes were inspired by the US prohibition era when putting booze into cakes was one of many ways around the ban.

So far in this series I’ve managed to do the technical bake every week but that came to an end with the Beignets. To get the choux pastry crispy required a deep fat fryer and unfortunately that’s one piece of equipment that our kitchen doesn’t run to.

My initial plan was to go with the cake and I was looking at options for incorporating a Mojito into it. The thinking being that if you’re going to put a cocktail in a cake make it one that you like. Then at the eleventh hour, or at least on Saturday afternoon, all plans changed.

It had long been our intention to go to Aldeburgh food festival this weekend. We’ve been regular visitors for a few years and if you ever find yourself in Suffolk on the last weekend of September I thoroughly recommend it. Set in the grounds of Snape Maltings the festival attracts hundreds of food and drink producers. They range from small start ups to established providers and all have their wares ready to sample and buy. There are also cookery demonstrations and workshops going on across the site. Throw in dozens of street food stalls and bars and you have a great day out. We always come away with bags stuffed full of produce and this year one of them contained a large punnet of ripe damsons. Just how large a punnet we only realised when we got home and had the inevitable “now what do we do with them” conversation. I googled damson recipes and the first thing that came up was a damson custard tart, with that the Mojito cake was off the agenda and will have to wait for another day.

Damsons are quite a sharp fruit so you will find that you have to use a lot of sugar with them when cooking. The lady we bought ours from said that she only cooks with them and can’t eat them raw. I tried one and the taste is like a slightly sour plum, not unpleasant although I wouldn’t want too many.

If you can’t find damsons and want to try the recipe you could use plums, but I would suggest reducing the amount of sugar that you use.

The recipe has a a sweet shortcrust pastry case, a rich custard filling that’s drizzled with a thick damson sauce. What’s not to like about that.

Damson custard tartlets

Baking these tarts and writing about them has taken me back to memories of the egg custard tarts that my grandmother used to make. Something tells me it will have been a simpler recipe than this, but eaten warm with grated nutmeg on top they were gorgeous.

If you’re interested in Aldeburgh food festival I’ve put a link to their site below.. Maybe we’ll run into each other next year.

Aldeburgh Food and Drink Festival Home

Next time it’s dessert week, I’m hoping for lemon meringue pie and/or baked Alaska. Dessert heaven.